SOURCE: “The Famished Road: Magical Realism and the Search for Social Equity,” in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, No. 43, 1995, pp. 25-30.

In the following essay, Aizenberg contends that magic realism as it appears in Ben Okri's The Famished Road, as well as the works of other writers, frequently comments on social ills.

My topic is magical realism—a maddening, marvelous, carnivalesque topic, dizzyingly imprecise, and deeply hurtful. Contrary to popular opinion, magical realism is not primarily Remedios the Beautiful flying heavenward in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Clara the Clairvoyant foretelling the future in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, or Azaro the Abiku shuttling between the realms of the living and the dead in Ben Okri's The Famished Road. Magical realism is just as much the block of frozen water melting in the tropics, fueling and destroying dreams of...